IMPROVING YOUR ENGLISH SKILLS WATCHING FORMULA 1

Rayssa C. Moraes.

Some people say that learning a foreign language it is boring or they just learn for obligation, but it is not true at all. These people just lack motivation. According to Harmer (2001, p. 51) motivation is "some kind of internal drive which pushes someone to do things in order to achieve something.” In this specific case, motivation I found in the Formula 1, the most popular and advanced form of world motor racing. Through this essay, I will show how Formula 1 can be useful to improve your listening and reading skills.

Formula 1 (F1) is a sport that involves people from all places around the world, so, to avoid misunderstandings between teams, engineers, mechanics, and other participants, a official language was chosen for the sport, and then the selected was English language. And because everything in F1 is in English, watching it can be very useful for improving your English skills.

Figure 1. Drivers during a press conference

To improve listening skills, in each grand prix (GP) you can listen to the press conference in the days before the races. In the press conferences, all the drivers are together and answer questions for reporters from around the world about that GP, the cars, the championship, and other topics. And, as the drivers are from different countries, you can perceive the accents and the different levels of English and practice listening. During the races, the engineer is always in contact to the driver and the teams allow us to listen parts of these conversations. It is hard to understand because of the engine roar. However, this difficulty is similar to situations from daily life, such as is when you receive a call in the street and, the sound is not clean but you need to understand. This is different from some traditional listening activities used by language school in which, the audios are clean and do not demonstrate the realities learning a foreign language. Besides that, after the races, the drivers usually give interviews and some of them are tired, pretty happy, angry or disappointed with the result of the race and this influences the way they speak.

To improve reading skills, students can read about the sport on the official F1 and Teams/Drivers websites where, it is possible to read news, curiosities, technical information, watch videos, and purchase gear. It is excellent practice because everything is written in the formal English language. For practice in informal English writing, fans can read the blogs about it. Both readings are perfect for learning a lot of expressions from the F1 environment.

Most of the people are shocked when they realize that I am a F1 lover and that it provided motivation for learning English, maybe because it is not a common sport for girls, but I really do not care that they are shocked. So, why do I like it? When I was a child, my father usually took care of me on the weekends but every time that I asked him to play with me he could not because he was watching F1 and I was really angry because I could not get his attention. However, some time later, he started to work on the weekends and I noted that he was sad to lose the races, so I started to watch it to give him a summary about the race when he came home. This has made become closer and soon I realized I could not imagine my weekends without watching F1. 

Figure 2. Kimi Raikkonen's official website

Ever since I started to watching F1 I was curious to know what the graphics and the notes that I saw on TV meant and, what they were talking about on the radio. I often visited the official website of Kimi Raikkonen, an F1 driver, to find some images of him but I could not read the news and understand the interviews because everything was in English, which was disappointing. As a result, I started to learn English to understand, because I like F1 so much, learning through it never was boring. I was always excited about English and, because I studied English in my school, my father always asked me about things in English that appeared TV during the GPs. Understanding the meaning of these things and explain to him was a great inspiration for me.

In summary, learning English with F1 can be very useful for a person that likes the sport. But more broadly, learning a language with something that you love is the best way to acquire it because there is an intrinsic motivation that makes a person want to learn more. Through passions the internal motivation increases during the process of learning.